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Review: Ada and the Engine inspiring, absorbing and heartbreaking

David Lyman, Special to Cincinnati Enquirer
Published 4:19 p.m. ET April 14, 2018

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(From L) Annie Fitzpatrick (Lady Byron), Brian Griffin (Charles Babbage) and Tess Talbot (Ada Byron Lovelace) are characters in Lauren Gunderson’s “Ada and the Engine,” about a 19th Century mathematical visionary whose work remained largely unseen because she was a woman. The production runs at the Know Theatre through May 12.(Photo: Dan R Winters Photography)

It only took a couple of minutes of Friday’s opening performance of “Ada and the Engine” at the Know Theatre to remind me of why Lauren Gunderson has become the most produced playwright in America's professional theaters.

She spins a good yarn, of course. But it’s the way she does it. At times, her plays feel like straightforward storytelling, a comfort to large swaths of the audience. Inevitably, her scripts are engaging and smart and well-researched. And just as inevitably, they are built around a central character we want to cheer on.

At other times, though, her plays wander into out-of-the-way dramatic realms; poetic or fantastic or, in some cases, otherworldly. And she does it all so effortlessly that we willingly follow her, no matter how illogical it may seem in retrospect.

In “Ada,” the character we’re rooting for is Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of early 19th Century English poet Lord Byron. She is, like her father, unspeakably brilliant. But her embittered mother, who left her husband when Ada was just a few weeks old, is determined that her daughter will not grow up to be the undisciplined libertine her father was. So she steeps her in the world of mathematics and music.

Tess Talbot plays Ada Byron Lovelace, the leading character in Lauren Gunderson’s “Ada and the Engine,” playing at the Know Theatre through May 12.(Photo: Dan R Winters Photography)

But Ada is obsessed with the father she never met. And in her hyper-active mind there is no boundary between mathematic logarithms and the poetry of music. She sees links among them that others simply cannot fathom. So when Ada meets Charles Babbage, one of the superstar inventors and mathematical geniuses of the era, she is as giddy as a modern teen meeting her favorite boy-band star. There is an immediate intellectual attraction. And perhaps more. It becomes a connection that will last a lifetime.

Ada’s mother regards the friendship as an abomination. So she steers her daughter into marriage with the pleasant, but far less inspiring Lord Lovelace. Like so many women, Ada struggles to manage a family, care for her husband and still find time to immerse herself in scientific exploration. But in the end, she collaborates with Babbage to create the conceptual framework of what many regard as the world’s first computer.

In a curious twist, Gunderson takes the story in an extremely chancy direction during the show’s final minutes. It’s not altogether successful. But designer Andrew Hungerford, who also directs the show, and the cast – especially Tess Talbot as Ada – will this odd turn to work.

In the course of a few years, Talbot has grown from an aspiring actor occasionally called onto the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company stage in no-name roles to an actor capable of turning in a compelling performance like this. Her Ada is ebullient and frustrated and fully involved in an intellectual universe that is hers alone. And Talbot manages to corral all of that into a character who we appreciate enormously even when she is at her most maddening.

As Babbage, Brian Griffin is as mystified by Ada as he is drawn to her. She is every bit his mathematical equal. But where Ada sees what all these equations could bring to the world, his vision can’t keep up with hers. Her brilliance dazzles him. But at the same time, it threatens him.

It’s the supporting roles that nudge the play along, though. Lord Lovelace isn’t Gunderson’s focus, but Cary Davenport turns him into an intriguing character. Sometimes he is that cliché of pre-Victorian manners. But as time passes, we see his love for Ada grow, even as she perplexes him. Davenport gets far more out of the role than the script would suggest. Annie Fitzpatrick is regularly one of the local stage’s most reliable actors. And she doesn’t let us down in the role of Lady Byron. From the tone of her voice to the bearing of her body, Fitzpatrick shows us a woman struggling to maintain order in a changing world that won’t permit it.

Hungerford and his cast play the humor quite broadly, perhaps even more than the surrounding text seems to suggest. At times, it’s a jolt to the rhythm of the play. But in the end, it can’t take away from the richness of a story that is inspiring and absorbing and heartbreaking.